Media and multimedia provision to client over different networks have increased tremendously the last few years. Today, Internet is employed by numerous users for accessing and downloading media, e.g. in the form of video and audio streams or files, from media servers. This media provision has also emerged in radio-based mobile communications networks. There is currently a very big interest in using mobile networks for multimedia or TV content. This is often referred to as Mobile-TV in the art. This media provision in the mobile networks is today mainly available through unicast transport. However, at the moment, broadcast/multicast delivery methods for Mobile-TV are under development. Examples of such standardisation efforts are 3GPP Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Digital Video broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H).
In line with this increasing demand for media provision in different wired and wireless communications networks, there is on-going work in the development of streaming and downloading servers available in wireless networks for providing media content to requesting clients. There is a general trend towards transparent and flexible streaming/downloading servers, implying that the servers should basically consist of a multitude of “standard” modules or programmes performing different media managing functions. The input media content to these functions is then provided together with instructions of how the modules/programmes should process the content. This will provide a more flexible media provision as compared to usage of fixed, pre-defined media processing in the servers.
Thus, there is a need for a media container format that can be used in line with the trend of having transparent and flexible streaming/downloading servers.